If your rooms are heated with steam, cover the radiators with wooden frames in line with the period of your room cut in open designs to allow heat to come through, and painted to match the woodwork of the room. See Plate XIX.
Let the fireplace be the centre of attraction in your room and draw about it comfortable chairs, sofas and settles,--make it easy to enjoy its hospitable blaze.
Sumptuous bathrooms are not modern inventions, on the contrary the bath was a religion with the ancient Greeks, and a luxury to the early Italians. What we have to say here is in regard to the bath as a necessity for all classes.
The treatment of bathrooms has become an interesting branch of interior decoration, whereas once it was left entirely to the architect and plumber.
First, one has to decide whether the bathroom is to be finished in conventional white enamel, which cannot be surpassed for dainty appearance and sanitary cleanliness. Equally dainty to look at and offering the same degree of sanitary cleanliness, is a bathroom enamelled in some delicate tone to accord in colour with the bedroom with which it connects.
This illustration speaks for itself--fruit dishes and fruit, candlesticks, covered jars for dried rose leaves, finger bowls, powder boxes, flower vase, and scent bottles--all of Venetian Glass in exquisite shades.
[Illustration: _Venetian Glass, Antique and Modern_]
Some go so far as to make the bathroom the same colour as the bedroom, even when this is dark. We have in mind a bath opening out of a man's bedroom. The bedroom is decorated in dull blues, taupe and mulberry. The bathroom has the walls painted in broad stripes of dull blue and taupe, the stripes being quite six inches wide. The floor is tiled in large squares of the same blue and taupe; the tub and other furnishings are in dull blue enamel, and the wall-cabinets (one for shaving brushes, tooth brushes, etc., another for shaving cups, medicine glasses, drinking glasses, etc., and the third for medicines, soaps, etc.) are painted a dull mulberry. Built into the front of each cabinet door is an old coloured print covered with glass and framed with dull blue moulding and on the inside of each cabinet door is a mirror. One small closet in the bathroom is large enough to hang bath robe, pajamas, etc., while another is arranged for drying towels and holds a soiled clothes basket. On the inside of both doors are full-length mirrors.